As we lead up to International Mud day on 29th June 2015, the Chimps have been practicing in our “Mud Kitchen’. It took a little while for the children to discover the equipment we had laid out for them - real kitchen items - baking trays, ladles, metal bowls and cups, pans, scoops and lots more, and even longer for them to find the bucket of water we had hidden, but with a little bit of encouragement from the practitioners they soon got stuck in.

The children were deeply involved in their play and their emotional well being extremely high as they made mud, picked leaves from our herb garden for their ‘cooking’ and made a stone, earth, water and leaf volcano – which later turned into food for our dragon! – But best of all was just squelching mud through our fingers.

The cubs had an interesting and educational visit to Cecil Street Dental Practice on Friday.

The dental nurses played games with the group and talked about good and bad food – which ones teeth like or don’t like. The children were very good and mostly guessed the bad food – when asked where do sweets go (meaning next to the red tooth on the wall) one boy replied ‘in the bin’!

Next the childrenhad a chance to practice tooth brushing using models of plastic teeth – we did lots of circles on the outside, top and inside of each tooth.

The group was given the opportunity to try on masks, gloves and glasses, before going into surgery to have a ride on the ‘magic chair’. We watched the mouth wash turn from clear to green before the special hoover sucked it up. Everyone was so good we got a sticker each and a goodie bag containing some toothpaste, a balloon and a tooth brushing sticker chart.